SIGHTSEEING

Traveling by boat on the great rivers of Europe turns sightseeing into a history lesson… or not. Some people travel the world and return home with postcards tucked alongside their stamped passports and with their cameras full of digit images having gained little from the experience except validation of their previous impressions of the wider world outside their home environments. For others travel is a lesson with Landscapes and cityscapes and the people moving in them as instructors. As in all effective education, learning begins when the learner sees and understands the connectedness of things. Questions are essential.  

When the great cathedral at Rouen was begun in 1204 A.D. on the foundations of a burned out Romanesque cathedral, it would be another two hundred years before Copernicus and four hundred years before Issac Newton would come along and suggest that the universe can be understood without thinking of it as heaven above with God on a throne, the earth in the middle with human at the mercy of the sometimes angry God, and a nether section ruled by a fallen evil dark angel.  It wouldn’t be until the beginning of the 19th Century that Charles Darwin would be born and grow up to change the understanding of intelligent education people about how the populations of living things developed on our planet. 

The emergence of terrorist groups especially in the Middle East are raising again the classic questions about religion and about God. Groups like ISIS and the Westoro Baptists whose raison d'être rests with their claim that they are doing the bidding of God are ignoring or defying science and reason. 

But… in Rouen today our attention was not on politics or religion.  We celebrated the birthday of friend Dorsi Finnegan by going for lunch at the La Couronne, the restaurant in a building dating back to the 12th century that Julia Child says in her book was her first culinary experience in France and one of the reasons she wanted to learn French cooking. Our lunch was as good as the one Julia Child describes in her book.  We continued celebrating Dorsi’s birthday back at our river ship. Dorsi got birthday kisses from our La Couronne server and from all the servers and officers on the good ship Vantage Venture.